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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 41 S itting around the backyard fire with Big John Martin, Chief Warrant Officer, USMC retired. Big John never drank much, a beer or two maybe, but strong black coffee and a flickering fire loosened his tongue and lit up his eyes. He liked his coffee in a Navy mug—no handle to bust off in rolling seas—and it was heavy enough to hold the heat and repel boarders. The Great Depression starved Big John off the farm. He was just 16 but big for his age, and he advanced his birthday a year or three and joined the Marines to get regular vittles. This was long before Pearl Harbor, but there was already war in China. He drew duty with the Fourth Marines, sent off to Shanghai to protect an international settlement caught in a crossfire, but more importantly, the RCA transmitter that made communications possible across the Pacific. He got out of there just in time. I threw another log on the fire. The smoke caught the sparks and sent them swirling. "Big John, I know you seen it all. You were with the Second Marines on Guadalcanal; in Korea, too. What's the scariest thing you ever come up against?" Big John didn't like to talk about Guadalcanal much, where the division got so mauled that the survivors were given a year off in Australia. But he would talk about Australia all night long, the lonesome and freckled-faced red-headed gals, the horse- drawn beer wagons, and the sawdust on the floors of the saloons. I knew I was in for a treat when he asked for more coffee. "Spring of '42, I was on Parris Island. We had three thousand men to feed real quick, and we were running short of beef." I had a nose for a story, and I smelled one coming, so I upped the ante. "You want a splash of brandy in that coffee, Big John?" "You got any?" "Yessir. Christian Brothers Four Star." He nodded. "The Colonel cut a deal with the man who owned Cat Island. There were wild cattle over there. You know Cat Island?" I did. They had flooded corn, and I got to shoot ducks a time or two. In the still of the predawn can't-see, I heard the Vietnam- bound recruits across the wide water, "Good Morning, Sir!" and on the evening hunts, the rattle of gunfire from the rifle range. I'd like to say things never change, but horizons by roger pinckney Japanese snipers and north Korean infiltrators? nothing so scary as bulletproof bulls. they do. Cat Island is all up in houses now, Big John has crossed his last water, and the Marines are still strung out thin everywhere but shoot a little rifle you can't hear that far. But right then the fire was still crackling; it was still 1968 and Big John was fixing to get a snoot of good brandy in his coffee. "You remember John Newsome, don't you?" I did. The proud, the brave, the few, lifelong Marines cross paths any number of times during their career, but I didn't want him to get distracted, so I dribbled out the brandy and let John Newsome slide. "I was supply sergeant, John Newsome was mess sergeant. They gave us a Jeep, a Higgins boat, two trench guns, and a sack of buckshot." The Higgins boat was designed by Andrew Jackson Higgins, a hard-drinking Louisiana lumberman turned boatbuilder. His 36-foot self-propelled barge was advertised to "trappers and oil drillers," but was really built for rumrunners. It had a supercharged Detroit diesel and a knob at the helm to blubber the exhaust through the bottom—no noise, no problem. Repeal of Prohibition in 1933 ended all that, and Lazy Days, EvErgLaDEs by herMAnn herzog courtesy heritAge Auctions/www.hA.coM